"Earthly Heaven/Joon"

There's about to be a new Hobbit movie, which means there'll be another round of curious people asking New Zealanders if "New Zealand really looks like that." And, indeed, Purple Pilgrims members and Christchurch-based sisters Clementine and Valentine Nixon make music that doesn't exactly go a long way toward diffusing the illusion of New Zealand as a mystical land replete with green fields covered in mist. "Earthly Heaven/Joon," the closing track from their split LP with garbled noise dude Gary War (out now on Upset the Rhythm), manages to make isolation seem more beautiful than terrifying by playing loosely with structure. As a song, it's barely there: just a thin organ mingling with breathy wind, goopy guitar licks, completely unintelligible vocals, and a couple of bizarre but well-timed ecstatic woops.